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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Joomla! is one of the most popular open-source Content Management Systems, actively developed and supported by a world-wide user community. Although it's a fun and feature-rich tool, it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and build a site that meets your needs perfectly. Using this book you can create dynamic, interactive web- sites that perfectly fit your needs.
Completely updated for Joomla! 2.5, this practical guide teaches you how to create professional, appealing and extendable websites, whether you want to create a full-featured company or club website or build a personal blog site.
The Joomla! Beginner's Guide helps beginners to get started quickly and to get beyond the basics to take full advantage of Joomla!'s powerful features. Completely updated from the first book, real-life examples and tutorials will spark your imagination and show you what kind of professional, contemporary, feature-rich websites any developer can achieve with Joomla!. This book thoroughly covers the concepts behind the software and creates a coherent picture of how the software works. This book is not about what Joomla! can do ñ it's about what you can do using Joomla!.
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Seitenzahl: 507
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
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Table of Contents
Joomla! 2.5 Beginner's Guide
Joomla! 2.5 Beginner's Guide
Copyright © 2012 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: March 2012
Production Reference: 1200312
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-84951-790-4
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Karl Moore (<[email protected]>)
Credits
Author
Eric Tiggeler
Reviewers
Peter Martin
Mohamed Abdelaziz
Acquisition Editor
Robin De Jongh
Lead Technical Editor
Chris Rodrigues
Technical Editors
Manasi Poonthottam
Ankita Shashi
Manali Mehta
Apoorva Bolar
Copy Editors
Leonard D'Silva
Laxmi Subramanian
Project Coordinator
Sai Gamare
Proofreaders
Bernadette Watkins
Stephen Swaney
Indexer
Hemangini Bari
Graphics
Manu Joseph
Production Coordinator
Melwyn D'sa
Cover Work
Melwyn D'sa
About the Author
Eric Tiggeler is the author of Joomla! 1.5 Beginner's Guide and has written several Dutch books on Joomla!, all of which got excellent reviews. He's also written a successful Dutch guide to the Drupal 7 CMS. Eric writes tutorials for several computer magazines and Joomla! community websites.
Eric is fascinated by the Web as a powerful and creative means of communication—and by revolutionary software such as Joomla!, enabling anybody to create beautiful and user-friendly websites.
On a daily basis, Eric works as a consultant and copywriter at a communication consultancy company affiliated with the Free University of Amsterdam. Over the last few years, he has written more than ten Dutch books on writing and communication. His passion is making complex things easy to understand.
Eric Tiggeler is married and has two daughters. He lives and works in Hilversum (the Netherlands). On the Web, you'll find him at www.erictiggeler.nl (in Dutch) and www.joomm.net (in English).
About the Reviewers
Peter Martin has a keen interest in computers, programming, sharing knowledge, and how people (mis)use information technology. He has a bachelor's degree in Economics (International Marketing Management) and a master's degree in Mass Communication. He discovered PHP/MySQL in 2003 and Joomla!'s predecessor, Mambo CMS, a year later. Peter has his own business www.db8.nl (founded in 2005) and he supports companies and organizations with Joomla! and Joomla! extension development.
Peter is actively involved in the Joomla! community where he is a member of the Community Leadership Team and Global Moderator at Joomla forum.
Peter has also reviewed the following Packt Publishing books:
His other interests are open source software, Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, DSL, Arch Linux), plug computers, music (collecting vinyl records), and art house movies. Peter lives in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Mohamed Abdelaziz was born in 1977, in Alexandria, Egypt. He is married and has two children, Reem and Omar. He obtained his bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the Automatic Control department, Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University, in the year 2000.
After working for about eight months in Egypt as a FoxPro developer, he joined EJADA Systems in Riyadh, KSA as an Oracle developer (forms and reports) until 2005.
He became a Sun Certified Professional in October 2005. However, after a short time, PHP and Joomla! attracted him because of the increasing demand on this excellent CMS in the web development market. He launched his first Joomla! 1.0.x site in 2006, www.egyptianreviewer.com, which was a services directory covering all cities of Egypt. He developed his first Joomla! component, Member Care System (MCS), and had it published on JED; this was his starting point in the Joomla! development world. Since then, he has completed a lot of Joomla! projects; installation, customization, and development from scratch. Currently, he has four extensions published on JED.
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Preface
Joomla is one of the most popular open-source content management systems, actively developed and supported by a world wide user community. It's a free, fun, and feature-rich tool for anyone who wants to create dynamic, interactive websites. Even beginners can deploy Joomla to build professional websites, although it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and build a site that completely meets your needs. This book will help you to get started building websites with Joomla quickly and get the most out of its advanced features.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Introduction: A New and Easy Way to Build Websites—In this chapter, you'll learn why you want to use Joomla: to create a cool looking, feature-rich site that's easy to expand, customize, and maintain.
Chapter 2, Installation: Getting Joomla Up and Running—You'll learn how to install Joomla on your own computer or on a web server, and how to install a sample site.
Chapter 3, First Step: Getting to Know Joomla—In this chapter, you'll get familiar with the basic concepts of Joomla: the Joomla interface and the principles of a website constructed out of 'building blocks'.
Chapter 4, Web Building Basics: Creating a Site in an Hour—Face a real-life challenge: use Joomla to build a basic but expandable website fast. Customizing Joomla's default sample site to fit your needs, adding content, menu links, and changing the site's look and feel.
Chapter 5, Small Sites, Big Sites: Organizing your Content Effectively—Making it easy to add and find information on your site: designing a clear, expandable, manageable structure for your content.
Chapter 6, Creating Killer Content: Adding and Editing Articles—In this chapter, you learn how to create content pages that are attractive and easy to read, and you'll learn about different ways to tweak the page layout.
Chapter 7, Welcoming your Visitors: Creating Attractive Home Pages and Overview Pages—When you've got your content set up, you'll create a home page and overview pages to entice visitors to discover all your valuable content.
Chapter 8, Helping your Visitors Find What they Want: Managing Menus—In this chapter, you'll practice designing clear and easy navigation through menus and see how you can help the visitor to easily find what they want.
Chapter 9, Opening up the Site: Enabling Users to Log in and Contribute—You'll learn how to give users access to the site, allowing them to create content and manage the website.
Chapter 10, Getting the Most out of your Site: Extending Joomla—In this chapter, you'll learn how to extend Joomla's capabilities using all sorts of extensions: using an image gallery to attractively display pictures, automatically showing article teasers on the home page, or enhancing your workspace by installing an easier content editor.
Chapter 11, Creating an Attractive Design: Working with Templates—Templates will give your site a fresh look and feel and make it easy to create an individual look, different from a typical Joomla site. You'll learn how to install and customize templates.
Chapter 12, Attracting Search Engine Traffic: Tips and Techniques—This chapter shows you how to increase your site's visibility for search engines applying search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, such as creating friendly URLs.
Appendix A, Keeping the Site Secure—You'll learn what steps you can take to keep your site safe from hackers or data loss.
What you need for this book
To follow the tutorials and exercises in this book, you'll need a computer with Internet access. It's recommended to have a web hosting account, so that you can install Joomla online.
Who this book is for
Joomla! 2.5 Beginner's Guide is aimed at anyone who wants to build and maintain a great website and get the most out of Joomla. It helps you build on the skills and knowledge you may already have of creating websites—but if you're new to this subject, you won't have any difficulty understanding the instructions. Of course, we'll touch upon basic terms and concepts (such as HTML and CSS), but if you're not familiar with these, you'll also find references to some web resources.
Conventions
In this book, you will find several headings appearing frequently.
To give clear instructions of how to complete a procedure or task, we use:
Time for action – heading
Instructions often need some extra explanation so that they make sense, so they are followed with:
What just happened?
This heading explains the working of tasks or instructions that you have just completed.
You will also find some other learning aids in the book, including:
Pop quiz – heading
These are short multiple choice questions intended to help you test your own understanding.
Have a go hero – heading
These set practical challenges and give you ideas for experimenting with what you have learned.
You will also find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "You can change the .contentheading style in the text editor."
A block of code is set as follows:
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "In the Menu Manager: Edit Menu Item screen, click on the Page Display Options panel name on the right-hand side of the screen to open this panel."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
One final point: the official name is Joomla!, with an exclamation mark. That is how it's written in the book title. But in the book itself we'll simply write Joomla, because an exclamation mark in the middle of a sentence is rather unusual and can be confusing.
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Chapter 1. Introduction: A New and Easy Way to Build Websites
You want to build a website. It should look great, and it should be easy to use and maintain. Keeping it up-to-date should be effortless. Changing the appearance of your site should take minutes, not hours. You don't want to manage it all by yourself, but you want to enable other people to log in and write new content without having to understand HTML or other coding languages. And when your site grows, it should be easy to extend it with new functionality—maybe adding a forum or a newsletter.
If that's what you're looking for, welcome to Joomla. When it comes to creating a great, professional looking website that's easy to use, you really can't beat the power of a content management system (CMS) such as Joomla. Without writing a single line of code, you can create any kind of site, boasting a variety of cool and advanced features.
Join the CMS revolution
Maybe you have already built websites the traditional way. That basically meant creating HTML documents—web pages—one by one. As the site grew, you'd end up with a bunch of HTML documents, trying to keep all of them organized and making sure all menu links stayed up-to-date. You'd probably maintain the site by yourself, because it was hard for other people to learn their way around the structure of your particular site, or to become proficient in the web editing software you used.
Enter the Holy Grail of web building: the Content Management System (CMS)! A CMS is an application that runs on a web server. It allows you to develop and maintain a website online. It comes packed with features, ranging from basic features to add and modify content to advanced functionality such as user registration or site search capability. In short, a CMS makes it possible to build sites that would normally involve a full team of web professionals with a massive amount of time, money, and expertise at their disposal.
All that magic is made possible because a CMS is really an advanced set of scripts (written in a scripting language, such as PHP) that use a database to store the content of your website. From that database, it retrieves bits and pieces of content and presents them as web pages.
This dynamic way of storing and presenting content makes a CMS very flexible. Do you want to show only a selection of articles from a specific category on a page? Do you want to display only the intro texts of the most recent articles on the home page? Do you want to add a list of links to the most popular content? Do you want to limit access to registered users? It's all possible—just pick the right settings. Additionally, a CMS allows you to integrate all sorts of extra features, such as contact forms, picture galleries, and much more.
The best part is that a CMS like this is yours to download and deploy today. You can pick the CMS of your choice from a range of freely available open-source products. Your new CMS-powered site can be online tomorrow. Now, how's that for a great deal?
Note
Open-source software is software that's distributed free of charge and more importantly it's unlocked, unlike software developed commercially. The Joomla source code is freely available and other software developers are encouraged to modify and to help improve the software. The name Joomla stands for alltogether. It's as much a software product as it is an international community of people working together voluntarily to expand and improve that product.
Why would you choose Joomla?
There are many open-source CMSes around. They're all great tools, each with its own typical uses and benefits. Why would you want to choose Joomla?
Apart from these typical Joomla benefits, it comes with all of the advantages of a state-of-the-art CMS. The following are a few examples:
The numbers seem to indicate that Joomla is the open-source CMS of choice for web builders worldwide. It's the engine behind some 20 million websites worldwide and this number is still growing rapidly day-by-day. Joomla is one of the biggest open-source software projects around, supported by a huge user community and is constantly being developed further by an international team of volunteers.
What kind of sites can you build with Joomla?
Let's have a look at some great real-world examples of sites built using Joomla. If you're someone like me, seeing inspirational examples is what makes you want to get started right away, creating something equally cool (or something better). These are just a few examples from the Web and from the Joomla site showcase (http://community.joomla.org/showcase). They are very diverse sites from very different organizations, each with their own goals and target groups. What they have in common is that they deploy Joomla in a way that you could too. They adapt the CMS to their specific needs, making it perfectly suited for the content they present and the impression they want to make.
Here's an example from Primary School of Music in Warsaw in Poland (http://www.bloch.edu.pl). It shows a clean, yet playful design, displaying a few highlights from the site's contents with a focus on outstanding graphics.
The following example is a website of a British country club (http://www.china-fleet.co.uk). The site offers a clear and attractive overview of the services and products.
Joomla can handle complex sites with thousands of pages. The following is an illustration of a content-rich site with a made-to-measure design: the Guggenheim Museum website (http://www.guggenheim.org):
One final example demonstrates that Joomla sites don't have to look anything like a typical CMS-powered site. If you want to, you can use quite a different design—and still take advantage of Joomla's default functionality to power the site. The following is a portfolio site of a German artist (http://www.philippklein.de):
Tip
If you're looking for some more inspiration, browse the official Joomla showcase: http://community.joomla.org/showcase or go to www.bestofjoomla.com and look around the Best of Sites section.
Learning to use Joomla
It may sound too good to be true. Does Joomla really make creating state-of-the-art websites side splittingly easy? Let's be honest—it will make it reasonably easy, but of course it does require you to invest some time and effort. After all, working with Joomla (or any CMS) is very different from building websites the traditional way. You'll notice this as soon as you start installing the system. Compared to setting up a simple static website consisting of a few HTML pages, building a Joomla-powered site takes a bit more preparation. You'll need hosting space that meets specific requirements and you'll need to set up a database. It's very doable, and this book will run you through the process step-by-step.
Once you've got Joomla set up, you'll soon get the hang of creating a basic site. The next challenge is to get things just right for your particular goals. After all, you don't want just any Joomla-powered site—you want to build a specific site, aimed at your specific target audience. The Joomla Beginner's Guide will help you to go beyond a basic site and make the choices that fit your goals.
Even using a CMS, it will take time and effort to create and maintain great websites. However, Joomla will make it much easier and much more fun for you (and your web team members) to get your site started and keep it evolving.
What you'll learn using this book
The Joomla Beginner's Guide isn't just about Joomla—it's about making websites, and it shows you how to use Joomla to make the best website you can. After all, if you're interested in all Joomla features and capabilities you can get a reasonable impression by exploring the interface by yourself and trying out the menus and options. However, even a user-friendly interface doesn't tell you how to deploy it in the best way in real-life circumstances. What's the best and fastest way to get started, what features and options are particularly useful, what are the ones you probably don't have to bother using at all? I want to help you to tame the beast that's called Joomla, to find your own way around and to get things done—with a great looking, user-friendly website as the output. That's what the Joomla Beginner's Guide is about.
The Joomla Beginner's Guide is focused on learning by doing—the structure of the book reflects the process of building a website. In the first chapters, you learn how to install Joomla, take a tour of the system, and get a feel for what it's like. After that, you'll learn all that's needed to build and maintain your own site:
Tip
Feel free to skip chapters!
Don't worry, to learn using Joomla you don't have to follow all the chapters and the exercises in the book step-by-step. After you've gone through the introductory chapters, maybe you'll feel comfortable to skip to changing the design of your site or adding extensions. That's okay—you can jump straight into most of the chapters and follow the exercises there as long as you have a working version of Joomla and a some dummy content available.
About the example site
In the course of this book, you'll learn how to build a realistic example site step-by-step. Instead of just learning about Joomla's capabilities in general terms, you'll meet real-world web building challenges. Throughout the book, you'll achieve all of your fictitious client's goals (that is, 'I want a website that my web team members can update themselves ,' or 'I want a website that makes it easy to navigate through a large amount of content').
Now who's that client of yours? It's CORBA, a club of Collectors Of Really Bad Art. They just love bad paintings and ugly sculpture. They argue it can be valuable art—in its own, ugly way. The CORBA people need a website to inform the public about their goals, informing the public about all sorts of bad art, showcasing fine examples of ugly art, and encouraging people to join and participate.
You'll take the CORBA site through different stages of development. First you'll base the site on Joomla's default design and layout. Later on, you'll add advanced features and shape the site's contents and design to meet the changing needs of your client.
The CORBA site is a good example of what you can accomplish with Joomla. You start out with a basic website and add sophisticated features as you go. Of course, you can follow along in this book without having to actually perform all of the actions described—but you'll find it's a good and fun way to learn building a site and honing your skills as you go.
Summary
In this chapter, you've been introduced to the wonderful world of the Joomla CMS. You've learned about:
That's enough background information for now—let's get started! In the next chapter, you'll get the Joomla software up and running. After that, you'll get familiar with the way Joomla works and start building.
Chapter 2. Installation: Getting Joomla Up and Running
Joomla isn't just any ordinary software package that you can install on your own computer; it needs a web server to run on. If you are new to Joomla, installing a web application may seem daunting. And, let's be honest, running the installation procedure is probably the least exciting part of working with Joomla. However, if you just follow the required steps, it's pretty straightforward. It does take a little preparation, but if you have got everything ready, you can walk through Joomla's user-friendly setup wizard that takes most of the hassle out of the installation.
In this chapter, you will install Joomla on a web server, allowing you or anyone else with Internet access to immediately see and visit your Joomla-powered site. Your site will be accessible via your own web address (URL), such as http://www.example.com. When you build and customize the site, you will access the site through your browser.
Tip
Don't fear the technical mumbo jumbo
Joomla will make it really easy for you to build a state-of-the-art website—but installing the program will inevitably introduce you to some technical names and acronyms. Don't let this intimidate you. If you have never heard of PHP, MySQL, and the like, you may be tempted to call in your computer geek nephew to carry out the installation for you, allowing you to jump ahead to the fun and creative part—creating a beautiful site. But rest assured, you can pull this off yourself. It's like following directions to a destination in a city you are new to. If you keep to the instructions, you are certain to get there. Moreover, as you will do this more often, you will get to know the city map better and better. It will take you less and less time to get a new Joomla site up and running.
In this chapter, you will learn about the following:
So let's get started!
What do you need to start?
To be able to install and run Joomla, you will need hosting space and a few tools. Here's a full shopping list.
Hosting space
First of all, you will need a hosting space: a place on a web server where you can set up your site, making it accessible for anyone with Internet access. Your hosting account should support the PHP scripting language, it should support the type of database that Joomla uses, called MySQL, and it has to run the Apache server software. Specifically, the following are the system requirements for Joomla 2.5:
You shouldn't have any difficulty finding hosting accounts that meet these system requirements. If you are not sure, any hosting provider should be able to tell you if they support Joomla.
You can find detailed system requirements at the official Joomla help site: http://www.joomla.org/technical-requirements.html.
Tip
What if you do not have hosting space?
If you don't have a hosting account yet, you can install Joomla on your computer. This does involve installing web server software first. This means you will make Joomla run on your computer as if it were a real, live web server.
Although this approach is OK for testing purposes, there are some drawbacks. You will have access to Joomla from just one computer, and when your site is ready for the world, you will have to install it on a real web server anyway. In this book, we will focus on installing and running Joomla on a web server.
FTP software
To transfer files from your computer to a web server, you need special FTP software. FTP is short for File Transfer Protocol. An FTP program is comparable to Windows File Explorer or the Mac Finder. You use it to manage files and move them from one place to another—the only difference being that the FTP program allows you to move files from your computer to your hosting space on a web server (and vice versa).
If you are new to FTP, do a web search for FTPTutorial to get familiar with the basic procedures. See for example http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/ftp.
Tip
Looking for FTP software? Check out the free (open-source) Filezilla software, available for computers running Windows, Apple, and Linux. You can download it from http://filezilla-project.org. And if you are using Firefox, you might be interested in FireFTP, an FTP plugin for your browser.
A great browser (think Firefox)
If you are perfectly happy with whatever your current browser may be, you won't have any trouble managing your Joomla site with it. However, people creating websites often install more than one browser on their computer. Apart from the ever-popular Microsoft Internet Explorer (www.microsoft.com), you might want to install the up-and-coming Google Chrome (www.google.com). But you will definitely want to use Mozilla Firefox (www.mozilla.org). Having more than one browser allows you to check if your site looks okay in all major browsers. Do make sure that you have the current version of these browsers. Older browsers may not render current websites as they should (Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 is notorious in this respect).
A special benefit of having Firefox at your disposal is that there are many extensions for this browser that will make your web developing life much easier. One of these is Firebug, helping you to style your web pages using templates (more about Firebug in Chapter 11, Creating an Attractive Design: Working with Templates). Another great Firefox plugin is FireFTP, which turns your browser into a full-blown FTP client. Go to http://fireftp.mozdev.org to see how it works and to download a copy.
Tip
Upgrading from older versions
If you have already built websites with the previous major version of Joomla 1.5, you can't easily upgrade your existing site to Joomla 2.5. The main reason is that the structure of the content database has changed substantially in 2.5. What can you do if you want to keep your existing content and the existing structure of your website when upgrading to Joomla 2.5? You might want to try out an extension for Joomla, a component called jUpgrade. This will move your entire site, including its database, from 1.5 to 2.5. However, you will still have to update some things yourself, for example, a template used in Joomla 1.5 won't work in higher versions, so you will have to use a new template or update the old one. You can read more about upgrading on the Joomla documentation pages: see Migrating from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5, http://docs.joomla.org/Migrating_from_Joomla_1.5_to_Joomla_1.6.
Installing Joomla in four steps
If you have set up a web hosting account and got the tools you need, you are set to go. Installing Joomla simply requires carrying out the following steps:
The rest of this chapter will give you a detailed walkthrough of this procedure.
Time for action – downloading the Joomla files
Let's begin by downloading the current version of Joomla.
Make sure to download the full package (the other versions are upgrades for existing Joomla installations).
The default download file is a ZIP file. Download this file to your hard drive.Unpack the compressed file to a folder on your hard drive. If you don't have a software program for unpacking files, check out http://www.7-zip.org for an open-source file extraction program.What just happened?
You have downloaded and extracted the Joomla software files. All files required to install Joomla are now stored in a folder on your computer.
Time for action – placing the files on the web server
Next, start up your FTP program (see the What do you need to start? section, discussed earlier in this chapter) and upload all the unzipped files in the folder to the web server. This is how you do it:
Tip
Don't worry about the name of the root folder (httpdocs or any of the other names listed earlier). This name won't show up in the web address of your site. Visitors don't have to type www.example.com/httpdocs, just www.example.com will take them to your site. However, if you create a folder within httpdocs, this folder name will show up in your web address. If you create the folder httpdocs/joomla and install Joomla there, your site will be accessible only through www.example.com/joomla. This means you should only create such a subfolder if this is what you want (for example, when you are just testing Joomla and you want to keep using the root directory for your existing site).
What just happened?
You have just got your FTP program to copy all the Joomla files from your computer to the web server. Don't worry if this takes some time, as uploading thousands of Joomla files can take 10 minutes or more, depending on the speed of your Internet connection.
Tip
Some web hosting companies support a feature that allows for faster uploading: they allow you to upload the zipped Joomla file and extract it on the web server, using the file manager tool of the web server control panel. If your hosting provider supports this feature, it's much faster than extracting the ZIP file on your computer and uploading thousands of separate files.
Time for action – creating a database
The next step is creating an empty database for Joomla. If you are new to Joomla, the concept of a web application using a database may take some getting used to. The database isn't a regular file that you can create (or copy, move, or delete) on the web server. To create and manage a database, you use special software. Most web hosting companies offer you database access through a web interface (usually called a controlpanel). Popular control panels are Plesk and CPanel. You will find details on the control panel that's available to you in your hosting account information.
In the following example, we will use Plesk to create a new database. If your hosting company provides another control panel, the basic procedure won't be very different. However, if you are not sure how to access your web server control panel, your hosting company should be able to provide you with the details. You will also find online documentation for common web hosting control panels; for CPanel, search for MySQL Database Wizard on http://docs.cpanel.net to find information on this subject.
Tip
Sometimes web hosting providers don't allow their users to create their own database. Instead, they provide a pre-installed database. If this is the case, you can go on to step 4, running the Joomla installation wizard. You will need some database details for this: the database name, the database username, and a password for this user. Check the account information you received from your host.
